Spartanburg mentalist ready to mess with people's minds

"I've always had a fascination with playing mind games with people," said Ronn Winter, professional mentalist from Spartanburg. "So I got into magic. Magic and mentalism go hand-in-hand."

By Molly Phipps Halifax Media Group

“I’ve always had a fascination with playing mind games with people,” said Ronn Winter, professional mentalist from Spartanburg. “So I got into magic. Magic and mentalism go hand-in-hand.”

Winter started doing tricks in high school, but he gradually moved toward mentalism instead of magic.

He started out performing at parties and corporate events across the Carolinas. Last year, he began performing live shows. On Aug. 10, one of those shows is coming to the Joy Performance Center in Kings Mountain, N.C. It'll be Winter's first show in the area and is titled “Fate of Mind.”

“In this series, it is completely different from last year’s shows,” he said. “This show has also got a theme to it about fate and predestination, predestined events.”

While discussing fate in the show, Winter said he will entertain the audience with feats of mentalism and mind-reading.

“We will be tossing a top-secret object out into the audience to pick random participants. We make sure that it’s random,” he said.

Although he couldn’t say exactly what he would be doing in the show, it being top-secret, he did tell a story about a past show.

“There was a particular instance where this lady was to think of a person’s name, first name only, that she had an emotional attachment to,” he said. “She was a different ethnic group, Indian or something.”

Winter said it’s risky for him when the audience member is of another ethnic group, since the names are very different from American names and are sometimes in another language.

“So I took a shot at it and wrote down what I thought it was,” he said.

Winter said the word he wrote wasn't actually the person's name, but was the word for their occupation.

He said he was surprised at how close he came, without knowing the person's language.

For Winter, mentalism, contrary to what we see on TV, is all about mind reading.

His style of mentalism doesn’t include talking to the dead or psychic revelations. It’s about learning how to read people to find out what they're thinking.

While being interviewed, Winter succeeded in guessing the name of the person a Star staff member was thinking of, with nothing for a clue but facial expressions.

Winter said the show in Kings Mountain will be family friendly, like all his shows, with no cursing or vulgar comments. He does, however, recommend it for children older than 12, so they can appreciate the tricks.

He said he decided to talk about fate because he wanted the show to mean more to its participants.

“I didn’t want it to be about routines. I wanted it to feel personal to everybody in the audience, to mean something to everyone,” he said.

During our interview, I asked Ronn Winter if he could read my mind. Always a skeptic of magic tricks and mentalism, I wasn't sure it would really work. Winter agreed to try.

First, he asked me to write the name of someone close to me on a piece of paper, fold the paper up tightly and hold it out in my fist. He waved his hands above my fist and told me to focus on the first letter of the person's name.

"Say it in your mind," he said. He then asked me to do the same with the last letter. After a few seconds, he said, "I'm thinking the name has three syllables, is that right?" I told him yes, feeling a little uncertain now of my skepticism.

"Is it ... Melissa?" he asked. I sat in shock, stunned that he'd guessed it on the first try. "Yes, that's it," I said.I still have no idea how he did it. But I can tell you one thing: I'm a skeptic no longer.